Pennywise and Poundfoolish

Eliminate waste and become rich

When I visit my friend’s places, I often find that they are living an unsustainable life because they waste a lot. The chief thing that they waste is often money. True, they live within their paycheck-to-paycheck needs, but anybody who wants to retire one day understands that this is not enough—they know that they need to put a good portion of their paycheck towards building assets.

Eco-Hack: cook. Plain and simple.

By simply cooking at home, you can cut down on

• Money spent on packaging made from cardboard (saving trees) and plastic (reducing our dependency on foreign oil).

• Money spent on processing mediocre raw product

• Emissions from processing mediocre raw product

• Total food costs. These savings can be over 50% in some cases. Possibly even more if you were to join a CSA.

And you can increase

• Your bottom line. You will have more money to spend on cool stuff.

• Your health. It’s pretty much certain that eating pesticide-free products are better for your health.

• Your family time. In many countries cooking is the center of the family life. This is particularly true with my wife and I (who are always trying to outdo each other), and we intend to make sure that our baby will have the opportunity to spend time with her parents cooking. I could write a book on this, but luckily Barbara Kingsolver already did. Look up “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” for a look into what you probably wish your family life was like.

There is one consequence of cooking at home that may be a bad thing or a good thing depending on how you handle it. You will have plenty of kitchen scraps to fill up your garbage with. This means a higher garbage bill for you. Not exactly a good idea if you’re trying to cut your budget, right? Well, fear not! Kitchen scraps make great compost. I know—you’re probably thinking “no compost! I don’t have the time!  It's gross!” Well, fear not—I’ll bet that if you just post on freecycle or craigslist, you’ll probably find somebody near you who’s willing to pick up your kitchen scraps for their own compost. I’m willing to be that there’s even companies that make a living off of neighbors scraps.  Anybody know of any?

Visiting other people’s homes taught me that a poor person with a sense of creativity often has more potential for wealth than a person with a decent job, but poor spending habits. But let’s examine what it is that we work for:

• Covering the necessary bills. This doesn’t mean luxuries like a cell phone (yes. . . it really is a luxury)—it means stuff like rent/mortgage, health, food, entertainment, debt.

• Financial security for the future.

I have to ask—how secure are you if you are relying on a system that guarantees you will have utility bills that will increase with time (ever heard of a rate increase?). By taking control and installing solar or wind power and a rain catchment or grey/blackwater retrieval system, you never have to suffer from a rate increase ever again.

With two of the principles our economy is based on being that idea that people will spend what they make, and increases in pay cause increases in consumption spending, most of budgeting is a game of “hiding” money from yourself. The net result is that your future requirements are minimized. When you take control of your food and utilities, you maintain control for the rest of your life. Your requirements shouldn’t increase with time, as most people’s consumption stays relatively constant—there’s just more people drawing upon the system. The advantage of taking control of your utilities is not only never paying utility bills again, but you can also pocket the energy savings (and the extra equity in your home as this becomes a more and more desirable trait due to future energy crunches), and put this little bonus into your retirement..

I recently posted about the fact that I’m getting rid of my cars as a part of an effort to save a ton of money each year and do something good for the environment. Well, by not spewing out tons of pollutants, I am also cutting my expenses by a minimum of $3,600 per year with additional savings as gas prices rise (you don’t really think they’re going to fall, do you?).

The carfree thing is probably the biggest lifestyle change that I will really have to deal with. Installing solar panels and/or wind power and a water system is a one-time deal that will not require any additional energy from me to maintain year to year. So the potential savings could be thousands per year after everything is said and done.

I wonder how many millions of dollars is being missed by corporations and businesses that refuse to “go green” and save redesign their products to be cheaper to manufacture, and more energy efficient to build?

Working at an oil refinery day 1: orientation

Today we had a safety orientation working at the Refinery.  Man, are they ever picky about safety.  They also seem to be picky about how they handle their waste.  In their safety manual they list dozens of nasty chemicals that they deal with and their "waste streams" (read: how to "properly dispose" of these contaminates).  Refinery work is without a doubt dangerous, lucrative, and severely oriented towards safety.  I would like to hear some numbers from the Shell guys and from independent reviewers regarding their pollution controls, and areas that need to be further improved upon in the refinery process.  If anyone has any numbers for me, please feel free to post those with links.

Again, sorry for the abbreviated posts, I'm dealing with a lot of irons in my fire.  Any user-contributed information would be very useful to the discussion.

Gone on a "little vacation"

Today is an incredibly hectic day.  I will be gone on a business trip for two weeks to work for an oil refinery.  If I can't get respond to your emails and comments, I hope you'll understand that I'm out carousing with the devil.  I trust I'll get plenty of juicy tidbits from these guys for you all to see.

keep posted, digg my articles, post on reddit or whatever social networking sites you choose, tell your friends.  I will be back at posting when I can.

Have a great weekend!

zach

Gone on a "little vacation"

Today is an incredibly hectic day.  I will be gone on a business trip for two weeks to work for an oil refinery.  If I can't get respond to your emails and comments, I hope you'll understand that I'm out carousing with the devil.  I trust I'll get plenty of juicy tidbits from these guys for you all to see.

keep posted, digg my articles, post on reddit or whatever social networking sites you choose, tell your friends.  I will be back at posting when I can.

Have a great weekend!

zach

"green" is out?

By next year "the next big thing" will be manufactured by the marketing, advertising, and production companies.  For those of you who think that their lifestyles are stable, they may want to remember that it took decades for the entire concept of "green" to come about.  People have been debating global warming, and man's effects on this environment for a very long time.  Remember that it wasn't until oil prices went out of control and we had the science to explain the effects of unsustainable living on a world-wide scale that money began to be dumped into "green" products.

Remember that the key to a better world is reducing our consumption, and that by doing this on a massive scale, we end up taking billions of dollars out of the economy.  Where does that money go?

Screwing the corporations: how sustainable living hurts the economy

I’ve put my chips in one basket- that sustainability will create a better world; but that doesn’t mean I can turn my back on the complete picture.  We live in a money society, and our politicians would have us believe that the strength of our democracy is determined by the strength of our economy.  So how does sustainable, frugal living (the easiest and most satisfying solution to this problem) really affect the economy as it stands today?  Let’s look:

Let’s say that a bunch of Americans stopped driving and began taking the bus and biking.  There’s a lot more money made with each car sold in the U.S. and a lot of money to be made over the lifetime of the car—what with repairs, accessories, gasoline and other fluids, conveniences such as oil changing currently being paid for.  Let’s just say that 30% of Americans stopped driving over the next year.  What would that look like?

18,587,690,048 = amount of money made in direct sales of automobiles in 2004

5,576,307,014 = amount of money lost by better consumer habits

------------------------------

1,132,824,000 = average amount of gas sold in the U.S.

339,847,200 = amount of money lost by not buying gas for the cars we no longer have.

------------------------

45,000,000,000 = amount of money spent by Americans on insurance

13,505,400,000 = money lost by insurance companies by giving up your cars

Totalling everything up, we end up with about 19.3 billion dollars taken out of the economy.  So basically, if we can somehow re-allocate these fund to somewhere else, then we'll end up with an economy that doesn't falter.

Some thoughts on where we could spend 20 billion dollars and get an economic ROI:

• Developing sustainable biointensive crops in third world (and in America for that matter!) countries.
• Space tourism and exploration
• Government subsidized earth clean-up projects
• any others?

Happy Earth Day

Today is Earth day.  The environment couldn’t be more popular these days with many companies jumping on the “green” bandwagon (my wife informs me just now that many channels are running "earth day marathons" -- all day programming devoted to "green" living).  Many “real” environmentalists are continually befuddled by this massive consumer spending spree that seems to imply that our society still believes that they can buy their way out of their environmental problems.

True environmentalists however, have come to understand that in many cases consumption is unnecessary, and further—the more that you own consumed goods “in-house” (producing your own consumed goods- such as electricity), the lower your negative impact on the environment will be.

Does purchasing CFLs help reduce electricity usage?  Absolutely.  At the cost of contaminating our groundwater and soil with mercury, we can be assured to save our $10 per year on our electric bill.  A better solution would be to build houses in such a way as to minimize the number of light bulbs needed—a solution that will certainly be seen as a boon to the window manufacturing companies.

Does the Prius conserve gas?  Undeniably, but you have only to trace its production processes to realize that, while it is great on gas, it’s horrible for the environment.  A better solution is to find ways of modifying your commute to use alternate means of transportation.  That could go as far as moving where you live, or changing jobs.  It sounds extreme now, but think about it: what would you do if you had to pay $10 per day just to commute to and from work (plus the cost per day of car insurance).  What about $20 per day?  Those numbers are certainly coming in the very near future, and it would be wise for us all to ease into a solution of our own making, rather than be forced into something far worse.

Courtesy of noimpactman:

sell the truck, retire early

We currently have two vehicles-- a truck and a car.  Both officially get 28 mpg, however I hypermile, so I've been able to get upwards of 45 mpg on my car.  The truck has provided much-needed utility during the two moves we've had in the last year.  It was also given to my wife by her grandfather-- which was why I was somewhat surprised when she said she was thinking about selling it.  When you think about it, it makes sense:

1) we're a single-income home

2) she's pregnant and not going anywhere for a while

3) anywhere she does need to go can be reached easily by bus or taken by family

4) a monthly pass costs significantly less than the cost of gas

However the idea of eliminating my own car as well intrigued me.  What would happen if we were to go from a 2-car family, down to a 0-car family and we rode bikes instead.  What I came up with astounded me.  Saving $3,600 per year (roughly the cost of operating both vehicles, and their insurance at the first couple of years--not including gas) for 20 years would put me at over $115,000 in my 401k!  That's not including the normal saving that other car-owning people are saving.  Additionally, with fuel costs bound to continuously increase (they'll never go back to the old days of $1.20/gallon), that $3,600 amount is based upon gas prices which means that you'll continually increase the amount you're saving.

What do we get out of eliminating our vehicles?

1) Excercise-- with all the obvious benefits

2) Time to stop and smell the roses-- just like money that you put away to savings before you even recieve your paycheck, I have a hunch I won't miss the time spent my vehicle.

3) Face-time-- My wife is trying to launch a photography side-business.  Being outside, on the bus and interacting with people gives her a chance to practice her networking skills and build her business.

4) Build Wealth-- as prices for gasoline soar, this will eventually cause an increase in average salary across the board.  This "cost of living" increase, instead of keeping our family afloat like the rest of the motorized world, will just be icing on the cake and accelerate our retirement and house-purchasing goal.

5) Family time-- Biking, unlike driving a car, is something that kids can do with you at almost any age, giving you some additional bonding time (and it tires them out faster, I'm sure!).

6) Anywhere (almost) that we want-- most of what we want/need is within a 5 mile radius.  That's not a bad length (so I'm told) to bike on a daily basis.

7) Completely custom-- I can customize my bike any way that I want it to be.

If there's any additional points to be made, I hope people will fill them in with the comments.  It's going to be some time before we actually get this all together, but I'll look forward to it and keep all 9 of my readers posted. (that means. . . tell your friends to subscribe to Pennywise and help me improve this blog!)

Equation for Averting Worldwide Food Crisis

Give - Waste = Net Worth

This is akin to the classic equation:

Cost - Revenue = Profit

What you give to somebody is often paid for in goodwill, friendship, pizza, good karma-- and in a capitalist society-- money.  To waste something willfully is to inflict a cost on yourself as much as loss of the opportunity to gain some of that good karma-- or in the case of the problem of Modern America-- money.  From this point of view, giving your waste to the systems of modern industry is valuable as a business prospect.  From an industrial perspective, we have a nation comprised of people willing to produce the single largest growing new resource-- trash. 

Assign a dollar-value to decaying biomatter.  Now pay laborers to go through landfills and find organic, biodegradeable stuff to be shipped off to composting farms around the nation.  In these times you face decreased profit margins in a bussiness model like this from high costs of labor and fuel to transport (it is ironic that the very same inefficiency in business is causing negative environmental impact-- it makes me pause to wonder if a great many environmental problems could be averted by simply looking for cheaper ways to do things).

I propse a different solution to the labor-intensive one above.  With the rising cost of food in the world due to the continuesd addiction to fossil-fuels driving corn-based ethanol, it becomes somewhat advantageous to grow our own foods locally; either in our own homes or thorough CSAs or smaller, loacl farmers-- as was the American tradition before agribusiness stepped in to summarily delete from our daily lives the idea of fresh food, knowing where your food came from and what is involved in its production.

In order to accomplish this task, massive amounts of fertile soil will have to be brought in to these agricultural developments.  Where is this resource going to come from?  Given American's addiction to throwing things away, I believe that can capitalize on this and augment current recycling efforts with biomass recycling.  The process would work much the same as recycling cans, bottles, and newspaper.  A bin would be set out with instructions to throw all kitchen scraps into it, and once a week a truck will come and take it away.  From the consumber, it goes to a composting factory (next to or on the way to a landfill?) where it is turned into fertilizer and high-quality soil.

This increase in the amount of fertile soil provides further incentive for smaller agricultural growth as the downward pressure on one of the key ingredients to farming-- soil-- becomes. . . well. . . dirt cheap.  As we give our waste to industry instead of to landfills, we may not only avert the current worldwide food crisis, but also eliminate billions of dollars of waste, create tens of thousands more jobs, and increase biodiversity in Americas diet.

"Maxed Out" describes middle class nicely

This is the second video posted on youtube.  I encourage everybody to check out the whole video:

Concerned about your credit card debt?  Check out these real-life options for getting out of debt:

• Antishay
• Get Rich Slowly Forums

The great thing about these two websites is that they are from people who have gone through the pain described in the video; revolving credit, no financial plan, abusive creditors and predatory loaning practices.  They kicked the credit cards and so can you!